Top Tips For Keyword Research For Your Startup

Keywords and having the right amount of them to ensure optimum SEO is something you are probably hearing about from time to time in the business world. As a new online business you’re probably not flushed with cash and driving search engine traffic and generating revenue can be difficult without the right SEO support.

The best keywording happens naturally — when you are the expert in your particular niche. That said, with a little bit of keyword research you can enhance the value of content and make it even more valuable online.

In this article, we explore the best ways to do your keyword research, why you need to avoid keyword stuffing and ways to get the best keywords into your online content.

Best ways to do keyword research

Your ideal keyword is a word or phrase that your target market uses to find your products or service. Your keyword is popular and regularly used and the best ones are not too overly competitive (which helps you to get a good ranking).

Here’s how to do some keyword research for your startup:

Brainstorming and industry analysis

Here’s the stage where you brainstorm what you’re offering to find out the products and services your business provides, words your target audience might use when they are punching in to find you on a Google search, problems your product or service looks to solve, common misspellings or words people may use when searching for your product or service online.

If you’re new to the industry and you have limited info on some of these questions, you can read industry blogs to get more ideas for keywords and visit trade forums for a bit of an insight into what words are commonly used. Once you have found a stack of options, put all these words you put together into a spreadsheet.

Use keyword planners to find additional keywords

Google’s Keyword Planner is a brilliant tool for finding keywords people might be using for your business or industry. You’re looking for words with a decent number of monthly searches that don’t have a huge amount of competition so plugging in your service offering and scrolling through some of the search terms will help to reveal some of the common words people are using and that are ranking online.

As well as short keywords, focus on longer phrases of three words if possible to get more density of your keywords. Long-tail phrases are even more valuable, and plenty of keyword planning tools will help to unveil a range of short and long phrases that you might consider in your keyword campaign.

Analyze your competitors

When you are aware of your suitable keywords, now is the time to do a bit of research to determine whether you will rank for specific phrases. Research the top 5 to 10 competitors and find out their rankings and what you might be able to do to outrank them. Tools such as SEM Rush will help you to automate the competitor analysis process and allow you to get the metrics you’re looking for.

Use your chosen keywords in your website content

Now you have your chosen keywords; it’s time to use them for your website content and your online marketing to make sure all of your top-level keywords are incorporated into your page. Use the keywords in such a way that the content flows naturally as if you create content that is stuffed with keywords the readability will be terrible and your readers will navigate away from the page, which is not the aim of the exercise.

Finding high-quality keywords for your startup’s website will help to generate rankings and provide hopefully drive traffic and revenue. It’s important to ensure that you take the time to incorporate keywords into your marketing plan or engage a professional SEO expert or content writer with an understanding of keywords to do this on your behalf.

Why you should avoid keyword stuffing

While it is all well and good to get excited about keywords, the act of keyword stuffing is a big no-no in the business world.

Keyword stuffing is a black hat search engine optimization strategy and something you want to avoid like the plague. The activity of keyword stuffing means that you include targeted keywords on a page numerous times in a direct or deceptive way. These days Google will penalize you for this sort of strategy as it is an ineffective SEO method, so you will need to be aware that enthusiastically adding in as many keywords as humanly possible isn’t the best idea for your keyword strategy.

If you do get caught out keyword stuffing, Google will bump you down on the search rankings which will mean potential clients will be less likely to find you on the search engines, which is a massive blow for your startup business.

Not only is keyword stuffing annoying for search engine optimization it is difficult for your target market to reach content that has been stuffed with keywords as your content lacks the engagement and flow of a properly constructed piece of content that is written to be engaging, unique and easy to read.

How to measure your startups keyword success

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up our keyword strategy, it’s important to measure it and make sure you constantly improve it to get the best results. Google and the online world are constantly changing, so you can’t rest on your laurels when it comes to keywords and SEO.

Although every business is unique, there are a few metrics you can track to get some good insight into whether your keywords are cooking with gas or if you need to tweak them a little to get better results.

Here are a few things to look out for in your analytics:

Traffic source for your website – understand and be aware of direct navigation including traffic, bookmarks, email links, referral traffic and search traffic. All of these pieces of information help to provide an overview on the share of referring visits to your website.

Search engine referrals – there are three major search engines, yet the majority of traffic will come from Google in the western world, however, it’s important to compare where the referrals are coming from so you can compare performance and the market share.

Visits based on each search engines phrases – drilling a little deeper into the point above, it’s important to see if each of the three search engines have different search terms that are being used so you can identify trends for traffic.

Conversion rate by search term – this is a pearl of information and will help to give you some serious information on the query that users typed in to find your site. You could find a gem of a search term that you might not have considered that you can add to your targeted keywords if you dig deep enough, so take the time to do your search.

Pages receiving one or more visits from search engines – there are going to be popular pages for your website, and it is important for you to get an idea of the pages that receive the most amount of traffic. The success of specific pages will help to identify which pages are working the best for your business so you can focus on these pages and replicate the metrics across your website.

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